Nokia's Windows phones, new content deals for the XBox and the pending …

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Don't call it Microsoft's final CES keynote—call it a "pause." That's how Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, tried to spin the news that this would be the last foreseeable CES keynote address delivered by a Microsoft CEO after a 14-year streak. But it wasn't so much a keynote as an infomercial talk show—rather than driving the show himself, Ballmer chose to have American Idol presenter Ryan Seacrest act as the host and interviewer for the evening.

Buried in the hour-long keynote, there were a few nuggets of news. Some of it got spilled earlier in the day at AT&T's Developer Summit at The Palms by Ballmer himself—the arrival of the first 4G LTE Windows phone from Nokia, the Lumia 900, in an exclusive deal with AT&T, though no release date was given. The Lumia 710, a 3G Windows Phone, will be the first Nokia available in the US, available through T-Mobile on January 11. Ballmer also highlighted another Windows phone coming to AT&T. the HTC Titan II, with a 4.7-inch screen and a 16-megapixel camera.

After a musical interlude in which a choir sang "tweets" people had allegedly posted to Twitter in anticipation of the keynote, Ballmer moved onto the XBox and Kinect. He announced a set of content deals for the XBox, including deals with Comcast, the Wall Street Journal, Fox, and IGN to deliver video content directly to XBox Live subscribers. Comcast will bring "the XFinity library" to XBox, Ballmer said, and others will produce original content for the platform. The content deals are part of what Ballmer described as the evolution of the XBox from purely a gaming platform to an "all in one entertainment device for your living room."

The Kinect interface got a good deal of stage time, including a demonstration of voice integration with Bing search for content on the XBox and an interactive learning game from Sesame Street. Kinect will now be coming officially to Windows, with the commercial release of the Kinect API for Windows coming on February 1. Kinect API code had previously been in beta primarily for research use; now Microsoft is working with over 200 companies to develop software for the Kinect, Ballmer said.

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Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat